Comment by tomcam
4 hours ago
Amen. I couldn’t have said it better.
In general for the 40+ years I’ve been a programmer I have detested the practice of not surfacing diagnostic information to users when technology makes it possible to do so in a clear and unambiguous way.
Most users tend to ignore diagnostic information.
"What did the error message say"
"I don't know."
This is because error messages have historically been bad, unintelligible, un-actionable, and hard to separate from soft errors that don't actually matter.
'Segmentation fault. Core dumped.'
'Non-fatal error detected. Contact support.'
'An error occurred.'
'An illegal operation was performed.'
'Error 92: Insufficient marmalade.'
'Saving this image as a JPG will not preserve the transparency used in the image. Save anyway?'
'Saving as .docx is not recommended because blah-blah-blah never gonna give you up nor let you down.'
I can't blame any normal user from either not understanding nor giving a shit about any of these. If we'd given users actionable information from day 1, we'd be in a very different world. Even just 'Error 852: Couldn't reach the network. Check your connection to the internet.' does help those who haven't turned of their brains entirely yet.
The author Terry Pratchett had some of best error messages in his Discworld novels. The Hex computer could produce the following
++?????++ Out of Cheese Error. Redo From Start.
+++ Divide By Cucumber Error. Please Reinstall Universe And Reboot +++
+++Whoops! Here comes the cheese! +++
30 or so years back, one of the Mac magazines had a customer support quote along these lines:
"I don't understand, it says 'System Error Type 11', and no matter how many times I type 11, nothing happens!"
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